Holocaust Sites in Ukraine: Pechora and the Politics of Memorialization

This study of the Pechora camp, in Transnistria, examines the contributions of contemporary testimonies to our understanding of the Holocaust experience and the ways survivors and witnesses perceive and recount that experience over time. In the case of Transnistria, the testimonies of living witnesses may at times provide the only significant historical and social record of the ghetto and camp experience. While existing scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria has emerged primarily out of the Romanian Jewish experience of the war, this article highlights the wartime experiences and postwar memories of Ukrainian Jewish survivors, whose perspectives on Transnistria have until recently been overlooked. The author also offers a distinctly ethnographic dimension to the study of the Holocaust by examining memory and identity processes and by revealing substantial fissures in the way the Holocaust is remembered and memorialized.